One of Zap Calendar's unique features is the ability to automatically post upcoming events to Facebook.  For example, an upcoming event in your calendar could be posted automatically 2 days prior to the event on your Facebook page. Over the years this feature has been accomplished through several services that have since come and gone.  Twitter Feed is the latest service to shut down that was used to push Zap Calendar events to Facebook. Fortunately, there is a new service that can also push events to Facebook and this service appears to be much more popular due to the multiple connected sources it supports.  Zapier (No relationship to Zap Calendar ;-) connects applications and automates workflows using "Zaps" (really, there is not relationship between us and them), and works very nicely with posting events from your Zap Calendar site to Facebook. This article describes how to configure Zapier and Zap Calendar to enable posting of events to Facebook. This feature is available with all versions of Zap Calendar, including the Lite version.

Read more: Tutorial: Automatic Posting of Events to Facebook (Updated)

We have written previously about how to automatically post upcoming events from Zap Calendar to Facebook using Zapier. This article will show you how to automatically post upcoming events to Twitter using IFTTT.com . IFTTT.com, which stands for, "If This, Then That", also allows automatically posting events to Facebook too, however, this tutorial will show how to post upcoming events to Twitter. This feature is available with all versions of Zap Calendar, including the Lite version.

Read more: Tutorial: How to Automatically Tweet Events Using IFTTT.com

Data Scraping Protection (DSP) is a new feature with Zap Calendar 4.2.  When enabled, DSP takes Joomla's internal IDs in Zap Calendar URL's and replaces them with alternate, non-sequential IDs. This prevents your event data from getting stolen by bots or users using URL guessing or automatic URL generation techniques. 

For example, a Zap Calendar non-SEF URL like this:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/option=com_zcalendar?view=event&calid=7&id=1762&Itemid=212

will be converted to this URL when DSP is enabled:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/option=com_zcalendar?view=event&calid=BF8A06622C9279C5&id=676E9E9F5EA074D4&Itemid=212

This works for SEF URLs too.  For example:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/7,1762-friday-meeting 

will be converted to this DSP URL:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/BF8A06622C9279C5,676E9E9F5EA074D4-friday-meeting

With DSP enabled, the internal event ID and calendar ID are replaced with a non-sequential number, making it impossible to guess the URLs of events. Interestingly, sh404SEF URLs will not change if DSP is enabled or disabled. However, you will need to purge your old links in sh404SEF's URL Manager to rebuild the SEF URLs using the new Zap Calendar URLs.

DSP may not be for everyone, but may be useful for sites where protecting your calendar data is important, for example, when users create their own events or when Zap Calendar's personal calendar feature is enabled.  When data scraping protection is enabled, URLs in the original format will no longer work.  It is best to enable this for a new Zap Calendar site or set the feature to "transitional" for existing sites.  Transitional mode will create the new URL's but will still accept old URLs.  Switching from transitional to full protection can be done later when use of the old URLs is minimized.

DSP is a site wide feature and is enabled from the global Zap Calendar settings.  This feature works only with Zap Calendar URLs.  It is available with all Zap Calendar free and subscription versions.